Gina didn’t know what to say. She cocked her head this way, that, looked out on to Summer Street, chewed her lip. “You could, oh, get a job.”
“Doing what?”
Gina wanted to point out the sewing machine, the looms, St. Vincent’s, St. Mary’s, Salvo’s restaurants, the houses Mimoo cleaned, the quarries, the lumber yards, the printing presses, the textile mills. She wanted to gently remind Harry of his black contempt for indolent Dyson, a boy proud of his desire to work only five hours a day. She wanted to tell him that Canney’s, the basket-weaving factory, was hiring. She didn’t say any of these things. Because you couldn’t say them to a descendant of one of the Founding Fathers, an aristocrat. “How are we going to live?”
He shrugged and she saw in his face that he didn’t have a plan. “I’ll figure it out. This is new for me, uncharted. Give me time.”
She stood in front of him in her smart coat and hat, her walkabout shoes. She had her green purse in her hands, that’s how close she had been to going to the train station to catch the 9:45 to Boston to register for senior fall. Slowly she put down her purse and untied the ribbons of her hat.
That was six years ago.
“I was going to become even more politically active on campus,” Gina told him when she still told him things. “I was going to form a club to advocate for women’s suffrage. Perhaps other rights too. Advocate for women to be allowed to attend Harvard University one day. Maybe even teach there.”
“Women teach at Harvard?” Harry laughed. “What are you saying? That’s not a right, that’s folly.”
“I wanted to get my masters.”
“I wanted things too,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “They’re sitting in front of you in a skirt and blouse.”
“Indeed.” The verbal conversation ended and another conversation, less verbal but no less intense began.
“I’ve already worked in Salvo’s restaurant, Harry,” she said, picking up the topic of work a few days, weeks, years later. “I kept books, hired and fired, hosted. Washed dishes. Made pizza. I did all that.”
“So now you want me to take a job even you don’t want?”
“You want to continue living with my mother?”
“You know I don’t,” Harry said quietly, in the little bedroom they shared, with her Shaker nightstand and dresser, her narrow wooden bed. “You’re too quiet in your mother’s house. As if you’re afraid she’ll hear us.”
“I am afraid she’ll hear us.”
After they had tried hard to make sure Mimoo didn’t hear them, Gina tried again. “We both want it, we have to find our own place, darling.”
“Well, we can’t find our own place,” Harry said, “without money.”
She hung her head. “Not money,” she said. “Work. We can’t find it without work.”
He stared at her blankly. “That’s what I said.”
“No. You said …”
“What’s the difference?”
“Without work,” Gina said, “there is no money.”
“Oh the miseries of constantly toiling for a subsistence!” he exclaimed. “How does one ever have a moment to discover his path in the forest if one is always scrounging a penny or two for his next meal?”
“Immigrants don’t have the luxury of paths in forests,” Gina said. “They’re too busy working.”
“But I’m not an immigrant.”
She didn’t want to remind him he was also without luxuries.
The train ride was too long.
She would prefer not to be cold.
She would prefer not to have to work so long, so hard, so late that when she fell into bed she was too tired for dreams, for nightmares, for love.
Though in some ways raw exhaustion was preferable to having time to sit and think when the trains were stalled and the miseries multiplied.
Blessedly the train began moving. She would try again tonight. Everything had changed. He had to know that.
Three
GINA DIDN’T GET BACK to Lawrence until after nine and walked with her eyes averted past the establishment that used to be her brother’s dream, where the crowds used to mob him for lunch because he made the most delicious pizza in town. She kept her eyes to the ground and rushed the mile across Haverhill, past the Common, to Summer Street, a mile back to Mimoo’s small folk Victorian home they had been renting since 1899.
Braced for questions about her late arrival, she climbed the porch stairs and opened the door. Harry was sitting at the kitchen table with his back to her, papers and maps in front of him, huddled over them with Angela, Joe and Arturo. He turned his head to her, smiled absent-mindedly, distant intimacy in his eyes, and turned back to the table. Indeed there were loud words, but they weren’t for her. The four of them were animatedly discussing something problematic. But they always animatedly discussed something problematic.
“What is more important?” Arturo asked. “Freedom or equality?”
“Why can’t we have both?” said Harry. “Why do we have to choose? I don’t want to choose. And I want the people of Lawrence to have both. I want them to be free, to live in harmony, to be selfless and happy, and I want them to have economic, material equality. Not one or the other. First Lawrence, then everywhere. Right, Gia?” Harry wore a flannel shirt untucked and had a four-day growth on his face, there since Friday. His sandy hair was long, almost long enough to tie back. No one had hair like that, she kept telling him. That’s why I like it, he told her. There is no one like me. His clear gray eyes were as lovely as ever, his voice strong, calm, droll.
She bent to kiss his cheek. “Right, tesoro.”
Lightly he leaned his head into hers. “You’re home late. Have you eaten?”
“I’m not hungry. Salvo was working and Phyllis didn’t get the baby until after seven.”
“Did you talk to Salvo, Gia?” Angela asked. “About Christmas?”
Gina hung up her coat and hat, put down her small purse. She took off her shoes, put on her slippers. She went to the cast-iron stove and lit the kettle. Then she spoke. “I did talk to him,” she said. “Anyone for a cup of tea?”
But they were buried in the labor laws of Massachusetts. No one replied. She made one for Mimoo, and when it was steeped and sugared, she walked past the round table at which the radical knights sat, plotting and planning, and headed upstairs to her mother’s bedroom.
“Arturo says he’ll come for Christmas,” said Angela, her hand over his.
“I’ll come too,” Joe said. “If I’m invited.”
“Of course, Joe,” said Harry. “The more the merrier. Gina, you’re all right with Joe coming for Christmas dinner?”
“If he brings the turkey, why not?”
“Is your wife joking?” she heard Joe say. “Where am I going to get a turkey?”
“She’s joking,” said Harry. “She fancies herself as a bit of a comedienne.”
Mimoo was lying on the bed, still in her street clothes. She was salt and pepper gray now, heavier than when she had first come to America,